The Book of Dead Birds

by Gayle Brandeis

Sun didn’t say anything.

  “Don’t you wish it, too?” Helen closed her eyes so that she wouldn’t see the blink of the neon sign outside; the light bled through her eyelids anyway. “Don’t you wish we were back in our cave on Cheju-do?”

  Sun pulled herself off the bed. Helen toppled over.

  “Don’t you know what happened in that cave?” Sun lit a cigarette.

  “Our life happened in that cave.” Helen sat up. “All our dreams, everything we told each other…”

  “You’re still so naive, sometimes, Hye-yang.” Sun took a deep drag.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Haven’t you ever heard of April third?”

  “Of course I’ve heard of April third.”

  “The April third massacre, the one on Cheju-do?”

  Helen stared at Sun, confused.

  “Thirty thousand people were killed, and you haven’t heard about it?!”

  “That isn’t true,” said Helen. Surely she would have heard something if that were true.

  “People never talk about it!” yelled Sun. “Why can’t people ever talk about anything?!”

  “You’re making this up.” Helen rubbed her aching jaw.

  “It was 1948. Rebels were hiding in our cave, Hye-yang! Whole families were hiding in our cave! But the army found them! The army found them and killed them, Hye-yang, right there, right there in our cave!” She took a swig of vodka from a canteen one of the GIs had left behind. “You know those bones we found? People!”

  “Why are you saying this?” Helen asked.

  “It’s true! It’s all true! Women were raped! Babies were killed! People were tortured, Hye-yang—buried alive, whipped like dogs!”

  Helen covered her face with her hands but the neon still seeped through.

  “My grandmother pretended to be retarded so they wouldn’t rape her, but they did anyway! Two policemen put a plank on my mother’s stomach like a seesaw and sat on either end, Hye-yang. She thought they were going to crush her to death. She was bleeding for days. She thought she’d never be able to have children. I was her miracle, she said, even though my real father was one of the rapists! The man I call Father was in Japan for a year before I was born, so how could it have been him?!”

  “If this is true, why didn’t you tell me before?” Helen cried.

  “They told me not to tell! They told me not to talk about it! I didn’t think I’d ever be able to say anything, but here I am! It’s just words! It’s easy!”

  “My mother never said anything about this,” said Helen.

  “But she was there, Hye-yang! She was there! For all you know, your father was one of the rapists, too!”

  “Sun,” Helen started.

  “Don’t you see?!” Sun grabbed Helen’s hands. “We’re not supposed to say anything! What if we started talking about what they do to us here?! What if we started asking for better treatment?! They’d kill us! We can’t talk anywhere!”

  “Sun, you’re scaring me,” said Helen.

  “Good! You should be scared!” screamed Sun. She jumped up and started to pull shirts out of her dresser drawer, fling them around the room. “This is scary! This is scary!”

  Someone banged on the door. “Shut up in there!” he yelled.

  “See? You see what I mean?” Sun said, her voice steely now, mascara running down her face.

  Helen rubbed her jaw again. If words were inside her mouth right then, she couldn’t feel them at all.

  Another Audubon bird, gone.

  The Parrot does not satisfy himself with cockle-burs, but eats or destroys almost every kind of fruit indiscriminately, and on this account is always an unwelcome visitor to the planter, the farmer, or the gardener. The stacks of grain put up in the fields are resorted to by the flocks of these birds, which frequently cover them so entirely, that they present to the eye the same effect as if a brilliantly coloured carpet had been thrown over them. They cling around the whole stack, pull out the straws, and destroy twice as much of the grain as would suffice to satisfy their hunger. They assail the pear and apple-trees, when the fruit is yet very small and far from being ripe, and this merely for the sake of the seeds. As on the stalks of corn, they alight on the apple-trees of our orchards, or the pear-trees in the gardens, in great numbers; and, as if through mere mischief, pluck off the fruits, open them up to the core, and disappointed at the sight of the seeds, which are yet soft and of a milky consistence, drop the apple or pear, and pluck another, passing from branch to branch, until the trees which were before so promising, are left completely stripped, like the ship water-logged and abandoned by its crew, floating on the yet agitated waves, after the tempest has ceased. They visit the mulberries, pecan-nuts, grapes, and even the seeds of the dog-wood, before they are ripe, and on all commit similar depredations. The maize alone never attracts their notice.

  Do not imagine, reader, that all these outrages are borne without severe retaliation on the part of the planters. So far from this, the Parakeets are destroyed in great numbers, from whilst busily engaged in plucking off the fruits or tearing the grain from the stacks, the husbandman approaches them with perfect ease, and commits great slaughter among them. All the survivors rise, shriek, fly round about for a few minutes, and again alight on the very place of most imminent danger. The gun is kept at work; eight or ten, or ever twenty, are killed at every discharge. The living birds, as if conscious of the death of their companions, sweep over their bodies, screaming as loud as ever, but still return to the stack to be shot at, until so few remain alive, that the farmer does not consider it worth his while to spend more of his ammunition. I have seen several hundreds destroyed in this manner in the course of a few hours, and have procured a basketful of these birds at a few shots, in order to make choice of good specimens for drawing the figures by which this species is represented in the plate now under your consideration.

  My mother starts to come with me on my route. Every time we find a bird, she looks at me balefully, as if I have killed it myself. I have to keep reminding her that I’m not responsible, that I’m trying to help, but she just shakes her head and sighs. On the first day, I catch her trying to pluck some feathers from a pelican, and then a grebe—to put in her scrapbook, I’m sure—but I convince her that even the feathers need to be burned. I can see her scanning the ground for some evidence she can bring home and paste onto a page. I’d hate to see what she would write above it.

  “Omma, have you heard any stories about pelicans?”

  She strokes the top of a brown pelican’s head with her gloved hands before I scoop it into the bag. “The girl-who-kills-the-pelicans story? That one I know.”

  “Omma.” I stop for a moment. “I mean the myth about mother pelicans. People used to think that mother pelicans broke their own chests open with their beaks and served their babies pieces of their heart.”

  “You think I don’t do this?” She smacks her palm against her chest. I remember my dream, the hummingbird feeder, the taste of diluted sugar…

  In graduate school, some of my colleagues had babies. They were so hyperaware of how every little thing they did affected their children—they were worried about each second they spent away from their babies, each second they spent with their babies. They were certain they were setting their kids up for either a life of therapy and crime or a life of superstar genius fame and glory. I can’t imagine my mother worried like that when I was an infant. She certainly didn’t seem to when I was a child.

  I wonder what my mother’s heart really looks like. I imagine a wrinkled leather pouch, something mummified and dry; she could tear it into strips and serve it as jerky—chewy, saturated with salt. My mouth feels parched by the thought of it. I look at her, picking her way along the prickly shoreline, and wonder what my own heart must look like in her eyes. Sometimes I don’t think I can feel it in my chest at all. Maybe that’s why I keep turning to the drum, trying to find something, anything, that has a real pulse.

  “I’m gla
d your mother is going with you, Ava,” says Darryl when we return with our lumpy bag. “I’ve been worried about you going out there all by yourself.”

  “I don’t go anymore,” my mother says flatly.

  “Why not, Omma?” I ask. I wonder if she’s ready to get away from me, go back home.

  “I go with not-dead birds now.” She points to the kiddie pool full of sick pelicans.

  “Well, we could definitely use more help here,” says Darryl. “We’d be happy to have you. I’d love for Ava to come back and work in the hospital, too, get out of the sun a bit. Not that it’s any less hot in here, but…”

  “I like my route,” I say quickly. I realize how stupid it sounds, saying I like my daily death march. I still have trouble looking at Darryl. Emily rises between us like some sort of lurid neon-tinted phantom.

  “You know what’s best for you, Ava.” His voice is tired. I feel a blip of panic. I don’t want him to give up on me, but I can’t reach out. Not with my mother here. I don’t want her to see me wanting anyone. Maybe that’s ridiculous. I keep thinking about how Emily asked me if I had ever tried Ecstasy before. No, I told her, and I don’t have plans to ever do so, either. I was so certain about it, so closed off to the possibility. What is it with me? Why can’t I give myself the chance to have a little ecstasy—real ecstasy, not the drug—just because my mother has never been given the opportunity?

  Darryl’s name pops out of my mouth, barely louder than an exhale, but he’s already on the other side of the hospital. My mother gives me a suspicious look, then turns to stare at a woman trying to wrestle a pillowcase over a pelican. Many of the Salton Sea residents have donated pillowcases to the hospital to use as pelican restraints—there is only one pillowcase in the trailer because Frieda has given so many away. I think I recognize the faded pattern of flowers, the rusts and yellows and greens.

  The pelican puts up a good fight, but the woman finally manages to get the pillowcase over its head; in one swift pull, the pelican’s head emerges from the hole cut into the top seam. The pelican tries to open its wings, but it is foiled by the funny little dress, the drab muumuu, it suddenly finds itself in. The bird snaps at the woman, knocks the syringe of electrolytes out of her hand. It’s wonderful to see such a feisty bird, a bird with so much spunk. The woman grabs its beak and forces the tube down its throat. When I look over at my mother, she has tears in her eyes.

  The two of us soon fall into a rhythm. I take her to the hospital in the morning, then leave for my route. My mother hasn’t saved a bird yet; the pelicans keep dying in her hands. She seems to think I’ve jinxed her somehow, but it’s a relief to know I’m not the only one without a magic touch. Every day, we go home for lunch together, then back to our respective bird trenches, then back home for dinner. I am grateful to eat her meals, her kimchi, again—she brought out jars and jars of it, along with her other favorite ingredients, wrapped in pants and jackets. I am grateful, too, to be able to avoid the Aloha. I don’t want to see Emily, not yet. I cancel my classes for the time being, even though the killer is still at large. Frieda has left several messages on my machine, but I haven’t had the energy to answer them. I keep expecting her to show up at the trailer, but so far she’s giving me space.

  I’ve been feeling very quiet. My mother and I don’t talk much. I don’t talk to anyone much anymore. I keep waiting for my mother to burst into song, to start a pansori session in the middle of the night, but so far it hasn’t happened. I drum in the evenings, hoping to spark something in her, but she usually turns on her drill and does some carving, or takes Yukam’s cage into the bathroom and lets him fly around for a while with the door closed. I want to know more of her story, even though I have enough notes to keep writing for a long time. Not that I’ve written a whole lot since she’s been here.

  It had become a ritual for me to write almost every day, even just a little bit, before I went to bed, or right when I woke up, but now I feel so self-conscious. I can hear my mother breathing, and it reminds me that I am writing about a real live person, that I am most likely taking all sorts of liberties with her past. Her true past is breathing right along with her; I will never fully know it, no matter how hard I try, no matter how closely I bend in to listen, how wet her exhale against my cheek.

  I have all these scattered notes, these scattered words, these scattered feelings. They’re like the tapes I’ve been making—snippets of bird squawk, snippets of engine hum, snippets of throat clearing and fork dropping and wind blowing through saltbushes. Who knows if they’ll ever come together into something that means anything.

  Before my mother showed up here, I used to be able to shut off my mind when I wrote about her. The words just poured through me. I almost couldn’t control them. I never thought of myself as a “writer.” I was more a historian, a scribe; it was almost like I was channeling.

  Now the words have slowed themselves down. They come out one at a time, solid, separate; there is no longer any doubt they are coming out of me. It’s a very different feeling. They catch in my throat and I feel like I’m going to choke. They catch in my hands and I have to play the drum harder to try to get them out, because the pen is not enough on its own. Still, as awkward as it feels, I have to keep writing. I have to chase these stories out of me, exorcise them from my body. From our bodies.

  I find myself wanting to inject myself into the story sometimes, to scream out “Omma, don’t go there” or “Omma, why can’t you say anything?” as I write. I find myself wanting to scream the same things to myself. It’s getting harder and harder to talk; at the same time, it’s getting harder and harder to keep silent.

  Even my dreams have changed since my mother has come here. She never enters my sleep anymore. Her presence in my trailer, on these pages, seems to be enough. I still can’t seem to talk to Darryl, but he sometimes floats through my sleeping landscapes; when I wake up, he dissipates like mist—all I can hold on to is a color, sometimes a smell, a light pressure against my lips.

  The bird dreams, I remember.

  Last night, I dreamed I was standing in the water, naked. A pelican touched down on a wave in front of me. It poked the tip of its beak into the center of one of my breasts and gently drew out my nipple, like it would a worm from the soil; it did the same with the other one before it flew away. I woke up in the dark, my nipples tingling but inverted still, pointed inward toward my ribs, my lungs, my heart. I reached inside my T-shirt and pinched at my areolas until my nipples slipped out of their caves; I rolled them between my fingers until they were hard as pebbles, until I thought they might begin to glow. I started to feel a warmth travel through my body, slide between my legs, but when I reached down there, my mother made a sound, the couch creaked, and I pulled my hands away.

  “Omma,” I call to her. She’s in the bathroom with Yukam.

  She opens the door. The finch flies out. I do a quick scan of the windows to make sure they’re closed. Yukam settles on the faucet of the kitchen sink.

  “Whatever happened to that egg? That blue egg?” I ask her.

  “Anchee have it.”

  “She’s the one from the market, right?”

  “I work with her when you was little girl.”

  “So the egg is okay?”

  “I no want to bring in the car. Too much move it around,” she says.

  “It didn’t break or anything?”

  “Not everything break, Ava,” she tells me.

  “Did it hatch yet?” I ask her.

  “Anchee have it,” she says again. I decide not to press the issue. She scoops up Yukam and puts him back in his cage.

  “Your omma is not here to help you!”

  Helen woke up, disoriented, in her clothes, on Sun’s bed. She could hear Sun yelling, in Korean, in the street. She looked out the window and saw Sun standing outside, wearing jeans, a GI’s shirt, no shoes; she held a sign high up in the air. One word, in English, was written across it in large marker: UNFAR.

  “Women, your omma
is not here! We have to help each other! Women, women, we have to help each other!”

  “Shut up!” a man’s voice yelled from a room nearby.

  “I will not to shut up!” Sun yelled in English before she switched back to Korean again. “We have to help each other! Do you think the clubs are going to help us? Do you think the U.S. Army, the Korean government, are going to help us? They check us for diseases, but do they care about us? Of course not! They just care about their precious soldiers—they just don’t want their dicks to fall off! That’s the only reason they want to keep us clean!”

  A woman called out in response.

  “Shut the fuck up!” a male voice yelled.

  A few women ran outside to join Sun. Helen watched through the window, too scared to move, her heart bursting with fear and pride. Sun must not have taken any pills this morning, must not have lifted the flask. Her voice was crisp and fierce and awake.

  Helen wished she could yell out to Sun, support her, but her own voice was hidden somewhere, salted away deep inside. She hadn’t been able to sing for weeks. It was an effort to even talk; it was as if the words had to climb out of a dark, slippery well just to get to her tongue.

  “What happens if someone beats us up?” Sun shouted. “Nothing! They get off scot-free!”

  Women yelled and nodded in response.

  “These men can hit us, punch us, rape us, kill us, and do they get in trouble?”

  “No!” the women called out.

  “We have to say this! We have to talk about this! If we stick together we can talk about this!”

  Can we? wondered Helen. Can I?

  “We have to show them that we’re not just some little hole for their garbage!” Sun yelled. “We deserve to be treated like people! We are stars! We are superstars!”

  Men shouted insults from the windows; the women in the street shouted back. The air was soon so thick with voices, it sounded to Helen like a million drums pounding. Then a gunshot rang out and the group of women scattered.